July 26, 2005

Super Men

Jessica at Feministing links to an article announcing the appointment of the first man to head the Women's Studies department at the University of Washington since the department's founding. The thought of having a man head a Woman's Studies department when women are underrepresented in department chair positions across the board has a lot of people in a tizzy; I'll admit, this was my knee-jerk reaction when I first read this. But once I got past the initial discomfort of the thought of having a white man preside over a department that is overwhelmingly women of various ethnicities, I realized this might not be such a bad move for the field of Women's Studies and the feminist movement as a whole.

The main objection to the principle of having male professors of Women's Studies seems to be that, as men, they can only know so much about women's collective experiences and are therefore inherently limited in their capacity to truly be experts in the field [for one shining example of how this isn't true, just read the remarkably insightful comments of (male) Gender Studies Prof Hugo Schwyzer]. But what the critics who say that David Allen can only know so much about women somehow fail to acknowledge is that Women's Studies is an academic endeavor, and academia is among the last places anecdotal evidence should be present. If we're going to claim that Women's Studies practices the same sound, academic methodology as other fields, we shouldn't want to encourage professors in this field to draw on their personal experiences. The women who are Women's Studies professors should be using the same objective methods and drawing from the same objective materials as male Women's Studies professors. At that point, the gender of the person doing the research and teaching the material shouldn't matter nearly as much as the rigor of their research and the extent of their knowledge.

On top of that, there is something to be said about the symbolism of having a member of a group not included in the population to which he's devoting his academic career in a relatively high-profile position. It demonstrates that issues that are thought to affect only a subset of a population indeed affect the whole population, and that this fact is important enough to people outside the subset that they will work hard to obtain positions of influence in order to promote the social progress of that subset. As Allen says, "I do think men ought to be committed to supporting feminism, just like whites should be committed to supporting anti-racism." And if the attention Allen gets from this new position of power happens to encourage a few more men to support feminism and that in turn furthers the goals of feminism, then I'm all for it.

Allen's appointment is also a sign of progress for Women's Studies as a whole (which I've always thought should be called Gender Studies anyway, since that term expresses more accurately what it is). Priti Ramamurthy, an associate professor at UW, nails this one on the head:

"It marks changes in the field of women's studies. The idea that women's studies is only for and about women is no longer the case," she said. "It's moved to a focus on social construction, not just of women but also of masculinity, and the changing relationships between men and women, women and women, and men and men."